oh huh

so ... last week I was talking with one of my support team (not quite a therapist) about some of the intrusive thoughts I get

(like, uh, being intensely painfully aware that Yahtzee won't live forever ... every single time I look at him, not just occasionally)

and how it had the same feeling -- if thoughts can be felt, not so much emotion as, like, quality? -- as the nightly thought when I was a kid that I absolutely HAD TO say "good night I love you see you in the morning" or else bad things would happen (not guaranteed just a lot more likely) and it would definitely be my fault

and he looked at me and said "I'm not an expert but... have you considered that you might be somewhere on the OCD spectrum?"

(he may not have used the word spectrum, but he pointed out that humans inherently tend to be superstitious critters, and there's a range between "wearing lucky socks" and extreme clinical OCD, and while maybe I don't have enough disruption to be diagnosed as OCD, I'm still somewhere on that range, kind of parallel to how I'm maybe somewhere on the autism spectrum but too masked for diagnosis)

and my kneejerk was that I don't have enough of a germ phobia (even though I know damn well that is not a required element)

but second reaction was thinking about the persistent suicidal ideation I sometimes get, and the thing where I was literally unable to *not* pick at hangnails and dry skin (I could literally be telling myself "stop that you'll just make it worse" and still be doing it), and the only reason I stopped is my fingers don't have enough flexibility (and also sometimes I use tools even though they're less efficient and more damaging), and --

There's a lot of vagueness and overlap between various possible explanations, e.g. intrusive thoughts aren't necessarily OCD indicators; it could be depression and/or anxiety. With depression and anxiety and ADHD and maybe-autism all in the mix, figuring out my brain is like putting together jigsaw puzzles where the pieces of several images have been mixed together and there's no lids, so this set of pieces forms a bird but it's not clear which puzzle it belongs to, and this hole doesn't seem to have a match but either I just haven't found it yet or it's totally lost and I can't know which until everything is put together (only there are infinitely many puzzle pieces so they won't ever be fully assembled), and this other piece doesn't look like it belongs with the already assembled bits but I can't tell if that's because there's one more puzzle in the mix than I thought or just I haven't gotten to the correct spot of the known puzzles...

mrgfhhh. can I just be a cat instead???

Dream from last night.

Not sure exactly what triggered this, but I just remembered a scene from my dreams last night: I was at choir rehearsal, and a friend from college showed up for the first time because at the beginning of the quarter (this was a college based choir apparently, and a director I don't recognize after the fact, not a director from my personal history) I'd suggested she join, and she'd finally decided to take me up. Only, we were like two weeks shy of concert date, so director dude stopped the rehearsal and called her into the hallway outside. When they came back, she'd obviously been crying, and I was utterly miserable on her behalf as she took her bags and left, having clearly been told she couldn't join that late.

I don't like embarrassment, either mine or someone else's, and that apparently extends to dreams.

Dear brain: things are stressful enough right now, I don't need you making things worse...